This was an occasion for the celebrities of the new folk movement to pay tribute to one of the key figures in the revival of English traditional music. Vaughan Williams is best known as a composer, but he was also a collector of folk songs, which he described as "spontaneous, unselfconscious, unwritten musical utterance ... often of supreme beauty". He played an active role in the English Folk Dance and Song Society, so it was appropriate that the 50th anniversary of his death was marked by a concert in their austere hall. It matched stories about his exploits and quotes from the man himself against reminders of the magnificent songs that he helped to save.

There were two narrators - that great 60s innovator Shirley Collins and the singer Tim van Eyken - and the songs were performed solo or with minimal accompaniment. A husky Eliza Carthy gave an exquisite, breathy treatment of the Derbyshire carol Down in Yon Forest, before producing her fiddle for All Things Are Quite Silent. Jon Boden of Bellowhead was backed by squeezebox and vocal from Fay Hield for a dramatic story of love and death, The Sheffield Apprentice; while Jim Moray, in leather jacket, used guitar and piano in his gently theatrical treatment of songs like The Captain's Apprentice. There were more strong performances from rising stars Jackie Oates and Lisa Knapp, who sang the folk song that Williams knew as Cambric Shirt, but later became the Simon and Garfunkel favourite Scarborough Fair. At the end of the show, the phonograph used by Vaughan Williams was brought on stage, and one of his early crackling recordings - of a Mrs Humphreys of Ingrave, Essex, singing Bushes and Briars - echoed across the hall, before the full cast responded with their version of the song. It had been an emotional history lesson.